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Unencumbered by excessive forethought, Murat Önen choreographs both improvisation and calculation within the same visual territories. Regularly borne of vague sketches, he delves into the materiality of paint and potential for contextual subterfuge. Önen does research directly on the canvas, opening up spaces here and there where he can deposit spontaneous painterly moves. His motivations are in constant flux, tethered to his instincts yet opened up to new directives. This reflects Önen’s status as a processional artist, never falling prey to a plug and play attitude. He unites different methods of image construction, articulating each with discretion. His general visual attitude remains strong as a result, with the amalgamation of disparate techniques producing a syncretic optical language.
There is an endless thoroughfare that the painter coasts along, picking up and discarding historical references as he sees fit. This is a demonstration of indexical fluidity, as Önen exhibits a freedom of influence and a will to pursue his own aesthetic whims. To accomplish these images, the artist therefore leverages his own academic training while demonstrating a willingness to break with certain conventions. He takes apart representational forms, blurring the lines between the subject and his environment. To start, Önen applies a mass of paint, then he edits away until a satisfying resolution is achieved. The artist works on multiple images at the same time, as they tend to inform and support each other.
Borrowing aspects from myriad artists like Paul Cézanne and Diego Velázquez, Önen often harmonizes with figures from the past. For this exhibition, he pilfers directly from John Singer Sargent on several occasions, moved by the manner in which the portraitist’s slick and rough application of paint communicates a clear and confident momentum. In Painter I, the viewer meets a character from Sargent’s Marionettes (1903) plucked and respun into a largely abstract composition. Here, the puppet player becomes a painter, his doll and strings replaced by a paintbrush.
Elsewhere, in Drawing class (after Michiel Sweerts), the impression of a stage takes shape, the scene populated by pupils and professors. As the title suggests, here Önen defers to the Flemish Baroque
painter, whose murky palette is subsidized by genre scenes, portraiture, and allegorical imagery. Sweerts’s The Drawing School, accomplished in the mid-seventeenth century, represents the conventions of the Netherlandish academy through which one gains formal tools and participates in creative interchange. As aforementioned, Önen often invokes his own dalliances with academia, manifesting through his specific formal attitude.
Önen’s recent turn toward abstraction is an effort to open up his process to play. He combines real images and pure formal experimentation in order to build up an atmosphere. A little bit tired but brand new and I tried to show how sad i was, for instance, are built from photographs of the artist and other discernable subjects, while pure gesturalism disrupts the overall compositions. Önen is careful to maintain a balance between all of his different inputs, ultimately seeking an organic intermix of traditional dialogue and capricious forays into the non-representational mode.
Reilly Davidson